


observer effect

by moonjuicewiththepresident



Series: tma [5]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Anxiety, Eyes, Logic | Logan Sanders Angst, Logic | Logan Sanders-centric, Paranoia, Sort Of, Stalking, Watching, i mean i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-23 11:37:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23710894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonjuicewiththepresident/pseuds/moonjuicewiththepresident
Summary: He started to scan the faces of everyone he passed, looking to see if he recognized them, if he’d seen them before anywhere. Did Logan recognize the man in the green overcoat from the bus this morning? Did that bike messenger loop around the road and pass him again? No. They never did. Never. No one was following him. But something was watching. It still is.
Relationships: Logic | Logan Sanders & Deceit Sanders
Series: tma [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1707199
Kudos: 20





	observer effect

It’s still there, still watching him. There’s nowhere Logan can go, a place he can hide that it doesn’t keep looking at him. No idea what it wants from Logan, or if it ever had any plans beyond just staring from wherever it is hiding. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep, it’s been months now, and it’s still there.

You can’t see it, he knows. He can’t see it either, but that doesn’t matter, because it can see him. That’s what matters. He can feel its gaze burrowing into the back of his neck. Does it hate him? Does it just want him to keep living in fear? 

At first, Logan thought it was a person, some stalker who just kept hiding. He had this thought that if he kept feeling something was watching him, then it must be a person doing it. There must be someone following him. It’s not like he hasn’t had stalkers before.

He started to scan the faces of everyone he passed, looking to see if he recognized them, if he’d seen them before anywhere. Did Logan recognize the man in the green overcoat from the bus this morning? Did that bike messenger loop around the road and pass him again? No. They never did. Never. No one was following him. But something was watching. It still is.

A strange thing is, it’s a feeling Logan should be used to. He’s been watched by people for years. He presents the Look East segment for BBC News almost every day - well, he used to. And on the other end of that camera, there were tens of thousands of people, but he never felt it from them. Sometimes, as he kept his eyes locked on that camera, reeling off the latest string of burglaries, Logan tried to feel it, tried to imagine all the people seeing him, watching him. Even then, even when he was trying, it was never more than a dead, empty lens. Maybe it’s just as well that he never felt it before.

Logan lost his job within two weeks. This feeling coming over him, he couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t look at the camera, he couldn’t read the dead, empty words on the page. He ended up having something of an on-air breakdown. It ruined his life, ruining his chances of ever having another job, at a normal life, at anything normal.

He knew the moment it started. Looking back, it all seems so arbitrary, like a switch suddenly being clicked on, and all at once, Logan’s life was destroyed. It was three months ago, in April. He was doing inventory for some of his brother’s estate, it was largely up to him to take care of it after his brother’s death. His parents were taking it very hard and weren’t well enough themselves to make the journey down to his small house in Southampton to try and organize his meager possessions.

Logan wasn’t in a good place to begin with. You’re not meant to die of a stroke that young. He was only 38, and he wasn’t exactly the healthiest, but it just seemed so unprovoked. 

Perhaps you could say that his curiosity was the fault that brought this on him? But Logan didn’t open the box because he was curious, he opened it because he had to in order to fully inventory his dead brother’s possessions. Logan honestly didn’t think that’s a transgression. It wasn’t even marked as special - no oak chests or triple-locked brass boxes, just another brown cardboard box like any other.

Logan didn’t think that anything about it struck him as special. Looking back, he felt like it marked itself, that it drew his eye, and he would stare at it for longer than the other boxes piled up around his house. The place was so quiet, a lonely testament to Dee’s isolation. He’d never married, and there seemed to be nothing in that dingy home that said he had any friends to speak of.

In a lot of ways, it reminded Logan of his own life. He still had friends enough in Norwich, but no family except Dee and his parents, though Logan does have his reasons. Still, looking through his late brother’s things led to the sort of reflection that made him uncomfortable, and he was drinking more than he normally would.

It was his second day down there when Logan opened the box. He’d been going through all his old document boxes, and there were a lot. Dee had worked for the history department at the University of Southampton. Logan didn’t know what he specialized in - they never really talked about his work - but based on what Logan had found in his study, he’d written a few books on the subject of ancient myths and fetishes, those objects that were believed by various cultures to have supernatural or religious power imbued within them.

His first book was on the holy cross of Christianity, and how it operates as a fetish within our culture. Logan tried to read a chapter of it on the use of the cross in the vampire myth, but it was very dry and, quite frankly, a bit dull, even for him. Most of the boxes were similar, full of notes and clippings and bits of research that meant absolutely nothing to him. Logan put these aside to check with Patton Cartwright, one of Dee’s colleagues who he had contacted to have a look at what papers of his Logan couldn’t understand.

Some of the boxes, however, contained what he can only assume was practical research: fetish objects and totems from all around the world, small animal figures carved from bones, strings of glass beads tied together in intricate knotted patterns, grotesque quasi-human statuettes made of wood and old leather. Some of them were more than a little bit unsettling, but only one managed to send Logan spiraling into the place he was now.

It was one of the last boxes he opened on the second day. It was late, and he had already made his way through most of a bottle of wine. The more he thought about it, the more he thought that opening that box felt no different from any of the others. No hard feelings, no smells, nothing. It was just a box empty of everything except a single typewritten note and an old hand mirror.

It lay inside, utterly innocuous. If it was a trap, there was no way to tell.

Logan picked up the note first. The typing was neat, managed to be completely centered, even though the paper seemed to be a scrap that had been torn from a larger piece. It read, in all capitals:

“BEHIND YOU.”

He turned and looked almost before he fully understood what he had read. There was a window behind him, with the view of the street below his brother’s study and the darkening sky above it. There was nothing there though, nobody walking along the street, no cars driving down it, nothing that seemed in any way out of place.

Logan looked back at the note, shrugged, and reached down for the mirror. It was a bit heavier than he’d expected, and under a thick layer of tarnish, the frame seemed to be gold, or at least gold-plated. The glass itself was a bit grimy but still seemed to be intact. Though he searched the box thoroughly, he couldn’t find anything that might explain where Dee got it.

Logan looked in the mirror. He was a mess. Hair unwashed, eyes red from crying, lips patchy, stained a bruised purple from the wine. He hadn’t really had any time to take care of or even look at himself since he got to Dee’s house, and this ancient hand mirror really showed it.

Logan sighed, shook his head, and prepared to check the next box when the angle on the mirror shifted in his hand slightly, and he screamed. It now reflected the window behind him, and Logan could see a face staring in. It was dark outside, and it was almost entirely in shadow, so he couldn’t tell you much about the features, but it was huge, seeming to take up most of the window behind him. The only thing about it that he could see with any real clarity were the eyes - bright, shining, bulging eyes, with pupils so dark it made him feel sick, drinking everything in, watching with a greedy intensity. Logan could feel its gaze burning into the back of his neck, feel its unblinking eyes.

His muscles locked in sudden terror, and the mirror tumbled out of his hand, spinning only once before it hit the floor and shattered into a thousand tiny shards.

Seven years’ bad luck, isn’t it? Maybe that’s it. Maybe he has to feel this horrid, aching panic of the eyes he knows are following him for seven years before they finally leave. But maybe even that’s wishful thinking. Maybe this is now his life forever, and it will never, ever stop.

He’s tried to think whether he’d be able to go on if that was the case. He thought he’d try, at least until his parents passed away. Logan couldn’t stand for them to lose both children.

Obviously, that was when his real problems began. Logan could write the face off as a brief but horrid hallucination, but the feeling of being under constant scrutiny and observation isn’t something he can explain away so easily. He’d considered the possibility that he was just going insane. Being watched is not an uncommon symptom of psychosis or schizophrenia, and he’d been keeping an eye out for the other symptoms, but in all other ways, he felt fine. It’s true he was finding it hard to concentrate, but that’s only because he couldn’t sleep because they’re watching him. Those unseen eyes that hover everywhere and won’t let him rest.

Logan’s not mad, he’s sure he’s not mad. Logan still had what was left of the mirror. It was just a bent gold frame now. He tried to have new glass put in, but the only eyes it showed were his.

He did talk to Patton, though. He seemed a little bit unnerved by the line of questioning Logan was pursuing - or maybe just by how intensely he was asking the questions - but he answered him. He didn’t recognize the mirror, but a few years ago, Dee was looking into writing a book on the totems of what he called “outer cults”, small organized groups of worshippers whose beliefs weren’t simply deviations from paganism or other major religions, but seemed to focus on holy beings or concepts completely apart from what would be considered a normal religious practice. Some seemed to have more in common with ancient shamanism than with organized hierarchical worship, and all were highly secretive.

Dee had apparently collected several artifacts considered holy by certain of these sects, though Logan could find no details among his documents. Patton couldn’t be sure, but he believed that the mirror might have been one such object. Dee had apparently abandoned the project about a year before his death, choosing instead to pursue a line of research into Inuit ceremonial carvings.

Someone has to help him; someone  _ must  _ know something, they have to. He can’t keep living like this, in constant paranoia.

Those eyes still haunt his dreams and follow him through the waking world, even here. Especially here.


End file.
